Georgia gov’s corruption shocker: Right-winger’s shady get-rich scheme could be wildest GOP scandal
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/29/georgia_governors_corruption_shocker_right_wingers_shady_get_rich_scheme_could_be_wildest_gop_scandal/
Back in 2007, Georgia Revenue Commissioner Bart Graham noticed something funny in the state budget. What he discovered would bring to light a scandal then nearly 20 years old, yet which still hasn’t ended.
What caught Graham’s attention was a scheme set up in 1990 that granted regional monopolies to a handful of businesses for performing mandatory title inspections on salvaged cars. Funny thing, not only did these shops have no competition, but they never bid for the contracts, and on top of that, the state was paying the inspectors to the tune of well over a million dollars a year.
And lo and behold, the sweetest contract—for the populous region, including Gainesville and Atlanta, where fees were higher than anywhere else—had been handed to a company called Gainesville Salvage Disposal, co-owned by none other than Nathan Deal, a state senator in 1990, and, by 2007, a U.S. representative in Washington. Nobody could tell Graham how or why the contracts were granted, and Deal himself said of the process, “I don’t know there was much of an official thing,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009....
The only problem was that Congress prohibited members from serving as corporate officers and from making more than about $25,000 in outside earned income. And by 2007 Deal was earning nearly three times that amount from GSD per his tax returns. Representative Deal solved that problem by simply failing to disclose his position at GSD on his congressional financial reports, and listing his earned income as dividends instead, according to a complaint by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
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